Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, March 24, 1991 TAG: 9103210497
SECTION: BUSINESS PAGE: E1 EDITION: EVENING
SOURCE: TOM MAIER NEWSDAY
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
"Traditionalist newspapers are boring," said Sandy Shea, features editor of the Philadelphia Daily News. "Many of them are more interested in institutional history than in what has relevance to young readers."
Indeed, there's some evidence the $32 billion-a-year newspaper industry - traditionally a stodgy business - grew fat and happy in the past decade with profit levels as high as 20 percent.
These days, however, the happy smiles are gone.
Slapped hard by the recession, nearly every publicly traded newspaper company reported sharp drops in 1990 earnings. The usually robust Washington Post, for example, reported an 18 percent drop in net income for the final quarter of 1990. Help wanted, real estate and automotive classified ads - which fuel as much as 40 percent of all advertising revenue - have declined dramatically at most newspapers.
The Roanoke Times & World-News, because it is owned by privately held Landmark Communications Inc. of Norfolk, does not disclose its revenues or net earnings. However, the company reported revenues from the Roanoke operation declined 2.9 percent in 1990 compared with 1989. Linage, a measure of the volume of advertising sold in the paper, dropped by 3 percent last year from 1989.
Perhaps the most bedeviling problem, however, is the overall erosion in readership. Although some 113 million American adults pick up a paper each weekday - more than ever before - the pace of readership increase has not kept up with the growth in population, according to the American Newspaper Publishers Association. In 1970, 78 percent of U.S. adults read a newspaper on the average workday; by 1990, that figure dropped to 62 percent.
"The recession that affected others in the country finally arrived here and clobbered us in terms of advertising linage," said Christian Anderson, editor of California's Orange County Register, one of the Traditionalist newspapers are boring. Many of them are more interested in institutional history than in what has relevance to young readers. Sandy Shea Philadelphia Daily News features editor country's biggest suburban newspapers. That lament is echoed across the land. "It's been just short of devastating," said Newsday's publisher, Robert Johnson. Newsday's classified advertising has dropped about 30 percent since 1988.
As a result, many newspapers, both big and small, have tightened their budgets, reduced staffing through attrition and layoffs and cut back on expenses and news space. Editors and publishers also are being forced to think hard about the future of newspapers, both short-term and down the road.
"This is the third recession since the early 1970s, and every time we've experienced something like this, we've tightened costs," said Leonard Forman, president of the industry's Newspaper Advertising Bureau. "There's nothing that focuses your attention on something like pain."
To attract those who pick up newspapers only occasionally, news executives are trying all sorts of innovations - like stories that don't continue to another page and updating the "women's section" of yesteryear to fit the needs of working women. At some papers, these changes are being introduced slowly and soberly; others have shaken things up with radical overhauls in their look and content.
For example, in Los Angeles, the traditionally gray and sometimes windy Times now offers a brief summary below the headline about each major story. At the Chicago Tribune, editors are revamping their lifestyle sections to appeal more to working women, while The New York Times is poised to open its $450 million color printing plant and jazz up its Sunday sections. And in one of the most hotly debated newspaper experiments, the Boca Raton (Fla.) News, owned by the Knight-Ridder newspaper chain, transformed itself into a "newspaper of the future" that vaguely resembles Gannett Co.'s USA Today.
Some suggest that newspapers need to get a better focus on content, not just graphics, and address the changing needs of baby boomers - the nation's largest population group. No longer free-spending yuppies, these readers are nearing middle age, and many are married and responsible for children and a mortgage. For this TV-weaned generation, reading a newspaper each day can seem like just another chore, and zapping through dozens of cable TV channels, renting a movie for the VCR, or playing a computer game can seem a whole lot easier after a hard day at work.
Perhaps most alarming to newspaper executives is the decline of readership among young working women - often the most demographically desirable audience for advertisers. In 1982, 61 percent of women said they read four of a newspaper's five weekday editions; five years later, only 45 percent were picking up a daily newspaper on the same basis. Meanwhile, studies showed that women were reading more than men, but that they were reading books and magazines.
"What this says to me is that the problem fundamentally is not about time but content," said Susan Miller, an editorial vice president for Scripps Howard's chain of 19 daily newspapers. "Young women pick up the average newspaper and they don't see themselves in it. And after awhile, it doesn't seem worth the effort."
Some editors worry that newspapers are already too influenced by advertising and financial woes caused by the recession, and they say it threatens a newspaper's editorial quality and integrity. Some suggest newspapers are no longer a "must-read" simply because they've relied too much on fluffy and irrelevant features and gotten away from enterprising and hard-hitting stories.
"Once newspapers stopped competing, it became the newspaper," says Gary Hoenig, editor and part-owner of News Inc., an industry trade magazine, and a former Newsday assistant managing editor. "In New York City, there was a newspaper for everyone - a voice that spoke to every political and ethnic view in the city. Now they are seen as big business or like big government, in that same context. And that accounts for part of the credibility problem."
Daily newspapers, perceived by some as the official voice of a white male establishment, are also making changes to adapt to America's increasingly multicultural society. "Minorities are more and more a part of the American population, and this will require conversations about ideas where people in the newsroom don't always agree," said Jean Gaddy Wilson, executive director of New Directions for News, an industry think tank based at the University of Missouri.
Wilson said many newspapers have special features or columnists to focus on black, Hispanic and other minority issues. The Miami Herald, after several changes, decided to publish a separate edition called El Nuevo Herald for its Spanish-speaking readers. In focus-group interviews with readers, newspapers have learned there can be a delicate balance between pandering and legitimately serving the needs of its readers.
Slowly, the industry is taking steps to study readership patterns and enhance its advertising base - with many newspapers setting up panels to explore what others are doing.
"Editors are concerned with making changes to the paper for fear of putting off their loyal readers," said Scott McGehee, vice president of the Lexington (Ky.) Herald-Leader, who heads the American Society of Newspaper Editors' committee on the future of newspapers. "What we have found in most of the studies is that loyal readers also like change."
On the business side, newspapers are re-examining their approach. An ASNE study shows that readers valued "advertising for stores you shop" as highly as many kinds of news stories. On Sunday, coupons clipped from ads can defray the cost of the paper. To make things easier, some newspapers offer a directory of advertisers, and some have realigned their classifieds by subject categories.
With television's audience becoming more fragmented and less dominated by the three networks, the newspaper industry is making renewed overtures to national advertisers by recommending standard ad sizes and procedures. "Right now, there is no ease of purchase," said Forman of the Newspaper Advertising Bureau. "If you want to reach the nation, it's easier to reach one audience with the three networks rather than 1,600 newspapers. But that is slowly changing."
For all the gloom and doom provoked by the recession, however, many said reports about the death of the American newspaper are greatly exaggerated. "I don't believe it," Wilson said. "A newspaper can understand its community better than almost any other information source. If you serve people's information needs well, you won't be a dinosaur."
by CNB